Racial Geographies, Narrative, and Ethnic Form in Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son

• In Event: Asian American Formations and the Literature of Late-Stage American Empire

Abstract

This presentation turns to Brian Ascalon Roley’s novel American Son (2001) to explore questions over narrative, US nationalism, and ethnic consciousness in the 1990s. Of course, as a Filipino American bildungsroman, American Son’s narrative structure has been read as a formal critique of the US’s white normative regime due to its failure to comport to linear developmental narrative arc. This presentation, however, pursues a different tack. Rather than assume the genre to be always already representative of an ideal US national subjectivity for which the telos of the bildungsroman is supposed to lead, the presentation focuses on the multiple narrative techniques and rhetorical strategies—not exclusively progressive but recursive—that seek to “synchronize the non-synchronous” (Bloch) geographies and histories into a coherent ethnic form. Such an approach foregrounds the way that American Son’s bildungsroman narrative unevenly links together distinct and contradictory racial histories and geographies—a domestic history of the LA riots and imperial history of US militarism in the Philippines—under the sign of mixed race “Filipino American” ethnicity. In this way, the novel’s so-called lack of a telos marks neither a failure to achieve US national subjectivity nor its critique but instead an imaginative ethnic solution bridging both geographies and racial histories around violence and masculinity. In that way, the novel challenges US nationalist imaginaries that sustain divisions between domestic and international. At the same time, American Son retains elements—in the form of epistolary interludes, maternal figure, and narrative ellipses—that are stubbornly asynchronous to the novel’s ethnic form. Such features mark the gendered and diasporic remainder to Filipino American subjectivity. Ultimately, the presentation finds in American Son the constraints and potentials of ethnicity in the 1990s.

Author

• Christian Ravela, Arizona State University-Tempe